A Manual of Moral Philosophy

by Andrew P. Peabody

Jeremy Bentham (A. D. 1747-1832) is Paley minus Christianity. The greatest good of the greatest number is, according to him, the aim and criterion of virtue. Moral rules should be constructed with this sole end; and this should be the pervading purpose of all legislation. Bentham's works are very voluminous, and they cover, wisely and well, almost every department of domestic, social, public, and national life. The worst that can be said of his political writings is that they are in advance of the age,—literally Utopian;[24] for it would be well with the country which was prepared to embody his views. But, unfortunately, his principles have no power of self-realization. They are like a watch, perfect in all other parts, but without the mainspring. Bentham contemplates the individual man as an agency, rather than as an intellectual and moral integer. He must work under yoke and harness for ends vast and remote, beyond the appreciation of ordinary mortals; and he must hold all partial affections and nearer aims subordinate to rules deduced by sages and legislators from considerations of general utility. Bentham's influence on legislation, especially on criminal law, has been beneficially felt on both sides of the Atlantic. In the department of pure ethics, there are no essential [pg 216] points of difference between him and other writers of the utilitarian school.[25]

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In France there has been a large preponderance of sensualism, expediency, and selfishness in the ethical systems that have had the most extensive currency. There was a great deal of elaborate ethical speculation and theory among the French philosophers of the last century; but among them we cannot recall a single writer who maintained a higher ground than Bentham, except that Rousseau—perhaps the most immoral of them all—who was an Epicurean so far as he had any philosophy, sometimes soars in sentimental rhapsodies about the intrinsic beauty and loveliness of a virtue which he knew only by name.

Malebranche (A. D. 1638-1714), whose principal writings belong to the previous century, represents entirely opposite views and tendencies. He hardly differs from Samuel Clarke, except in phraseology. He resolves virtue into love of the universal order, and conformity to it in conduct. This order requires [pg 217] that we should prize and love all beings and objects in proportion to their relative worth, and that we should recognize this relative worth in our rules and habits of life. Thus man is to be more highly valued and more assiduously served than the lower animals, because worth more; and God is to be loved infinitely more than man, and to be always obeyed and served in preference to man, because he is worth immeasurably more than the beings that derive their existence from him. Malebranche ascribes to the Supreme Being, not the arbitrary exercise of power in constituting the right, but recognition, in his government of the world and in his revealed will, of the order, which is man's sole law. “Sovereign princes,” he says, “have no right to use their authority without reason. Even God has no such miserable right.”

At nearly the same period commenced the ethical controversy between Fénélon (A. D. 1651-1715) and Bossuet (A. D. 1627-1704), as to the possibility and obligation of disinterested virtue. Fénélon and the Quietists, who sympathized with him, maintained that the pure love of God, without any self-reference, or regard for one's own well-being either here or here-after, is the goal and the test of human perfection, and that nothing below this—nothing which aims or aspires at anything less than this—deserves the name of virtue. Bossuet defended the selfish theory of virtue, attacked his amiable antagonist with unconscionable severity and bitterness, and succeeded in obtaining from the court of Rome—though against [pg 218] the wishes of the Pope—the condemnation of the obnoxious tenet. The Pope remarked, with well-turned antithesis, that Fénélon might have erred from excess in the love of God, while Bossuet had sinned by defect in the love of his neighbor.

Among the recent French moralists, the most distinguished names are those of Jouffroy and Cousin, who—each with a terminology of his own—agree with Malebranche in regarding right and wrong as inherent and essential characteristics of actions, and as having their source and the ground of their validity in the nature of things. The aim of Cousin's well-known treatise on “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,” is purely ethical, and the work is designed to identify the three members of the Platonic triad with corresponding attributes of the Infinite Being,—attributes which, virtually one, have their counterpart and manifestation in the order of nature and the government of the universe.

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In Germany, the necessarian philosophers of the Pantheistic school ignore ethics by making choice and moral action impossible. Man has no distinct and separate personality. He is for a little while detached in appearance from the soul of the universe (anima mundi), but in reality no more detached from it than is a boulder or a log of drift-wood from the surface on which it rests. He still remains a part of the universal soul, the multiform, all-embracing God, who is himself not a self-conscious, freely willing being, but [pg 219] impelled by necessity in all his parts and members, and, no less than in all else, in those human members through which alone he attains to some fragmentary self-consciousness.

According to Kant, the reason intuitively discerns truths that are necessary, absolute, and universal. The theoretical reason discerns such truths in the realm of ontology, and in the relations and laws that underlie all subjects of physical inquiry. In like manner, the practical reason intuitively perceives the conditions and laws inherent in the objects of moral action,—that is, as Malebranche would have said, the elements of universal order, or, in the language of Clarke, the fitness of things. As the mind must of necessity contemplate and cognize objects of thought under the categories intuitively discerned by the theoretical reason, so must the will be moved by the conditions and laws intuitively discerned by the practical reason. This intuition is law and obligation. Man can obey it, and to obey it is virtue. He can disobey it, and in so doing he does not yield to necessity, but makes a voluntary choice of wrong and evil.

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